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Mar

8

The Chef Win Series is a response to: "How has Chef changed our operations for the better, in the past 2 years since our shop adopted it?" Example:

Beating an Internal Budget

You know the drill - start out with an optimistic time budget, increase as necessary. Except this time it went the other direction. This was the case last year when we budgeted some time to experiment with Docker on some VM work. We had the containers up after a couple easy hours of research, it all worked, then we spent the rest of the budget on other critical wins.

This is when you know you have a powerful platform doing your heavy lifting for you. You want to experiment with some critical new tech, and it's just a few painless keystrokes away.

It was a compelling story: One VM on Rackspace, a number of experimental containers - small bill, strong capabilities, clean separation of concerns, important piece of lab work done.

Because It's A Recipe

This takes some getting used to, because in the old world, once you get it working, you don't willy-nilly go destroy it. That's like throwing away all your lab work, just to save a few bucks on a Rackspace VM. But that's exactly what we do.

Completely destroy our VM, bring it back up a few days or weeks or even months later when it's time to work on that piece again. How cool is that?

A Transformation

Once again, Chef hasn't just made things cheaper and easier, it's transformed the way we work. The rules themselves have changed. And with it, our footprint in the marketplace.

We interviewed to partner up with a larger shop last week. "Docker? Oh, yeah, we've been experimenting with that, everything has been quite successful so far. Oh, you haven't? Well, it's pretty neat stuff, we'll have to show you."